by Sam Sisavath
It was late, and the garage was mostly empty except for the sound of a few tires grinding against the hard pavement in the other sections of the lot.
Quinn slid the Glock back into its holster. “Please, don’t follow me.”
Something that looked like disappointment flashed in his eyes. Or maybe it was sympathy. Or pity. Maybe all three.
“Are you going to shoot me if I do?” he asked.
“Maybe,” she said, hoping it was at least semi-convincing. Pete didn’t say anything, but didn’t follow her as she retreated through the open doors, either. “I’ll leave your weapon in one of the trash bins.”
“Which one?”
“I don’t know yet.”
He sighed and watched her as she reached back inside the elevator and pressed the tenth-floor button.
“I know you’re going to be tempted to stop the elevator at the lobby and use the stairs to come back down here, but please, I’m asking you, don’t.”
Then the doors closed and the elevator began its ascent, taking Pete with it.
Quinn spun around and hurried through the parking garage, and with every step thought, Go all the way up to the tenth floor, Pete. Go all the way up to the tenth floor, please.
She kept glancing back, waiting for the sound of the elevator to return, but it didn’t.
Not yet, anyway.
She rushed past the first trash bin she came to before dropping Pete’s gun into the second one, then spent a few seconds adjusting a McDonald’s bag to cover it up. The last thing she wanted was some kid stumbling across it.
The sound of tires grinding against concrete made her look up, just in time to spot a white Chevy sedan as it turned the corner, its driver leaning against the steering wheel while peering out the windshield in search of a parking space.
Quinn waited until the car was closer, then stepped in front of the vehicle and pulled out the Glock and aimed it at the horrified female driver.
The garage attendant gave her a strange look when she pulled up to his booth and paid for the parking ticket. She didn’t think he recognized her—there was no reason he would—but there was probably a sense of déjà vu since the car she was driving had just come through his gate not all that long ago. It was also very possible the man was wondering if he was going a little crazy after working the night shift for so long.
Quinn pulled into the street and sped up to five miles over the speed limit and didn’t let herself even entertain the idea of feeling safe until she could see the glowing white and red SOUTHERN METHODIST HOSPITAL sign fade into the background in her rearview mirror. Even then, the safe feeling she was anxiously waiting for was more like a mild sigh.
She made a few turns and was on the 249 highway heading southbound less than four minutes later. She was on the north side of Houston, far from the rush of downtown and the bustling commercial district of the southeast area. It made sense for them to bring her here; Gary Ross’s nightclub was only a few miles up the road.
The phone rang as soon as she slipped into the barebones late-night traffic heading back into the city. Quinn fished it out but didn’t answer right away. She glanced at the caller ID and only took the call when she saw the UNKNOWN NUMBER on the bright LED screen, confirmation that it wasn’t one of the agent’s friends or family members trying to get a hold of him.
She hit the phone’s speaker button.
“Fancy free and ready to mingle,” the familiar female voice said.
“How did you know?” Quinn asked.
“That you got out? Well, if someone else had answered, I would have hung up and gone on my merry way.”
“No. I mean about the hospital.”
“How did we find out where they were keeping you, or how did I know Clyde’s phone number? Or were you curious about how I shot a feeb from across the street when you couldn’t even see where I was camped out?”
“All of the above.”
“So many questions, so little interest in answering them.”
Quinn grunted to herself in the dark car interior. She couldn’t quite decide if she was starting to like her guardian angel or if it was more of a love-hate relationship, with heavy leanings toward the hate half.
“So where am I going?” Quinn asked.
“Why are you asking me?” the woman said.
“Isn’t that the whole point of this jailbreak? For us to meet?”
“You got it wrong, hot stuff. This is all you.”
“I don’t understand…”
“We just wanted to see if you could bust out of the joint. More precisely, we wanted to see if you would, given the opportunity.”
There’s that we again.
“And now that you have,” the other woman continued, “it’s time for us to say our adieu.”
“Is this a joke?”
“Only if you like nonexistent punch lines.”
“So this is it?”
“This is it. Try not to miss me too much.”
“Hard to do when I don’t even know your name.”
Laughter from the other side of the connection. “Nice try. I was born at night, but not last night. Actually, I don’t think I was even born at night.”
“You’re funny. Ever considered trying your hand at stand-up?”
“What makes you think I don’t already moonlight as one?”
“Comedians can’t shoot.”
“That’s a disgusting stereotype. But anyway, maybe if this guardian angel thing doesn’t work out, I might give the ol’ ha-ha routine a try,” the woman said, just before there was a click and the phone went dead.
What the hell?
Quinn slowed down, then pulled over to the shoulder of the road. She put the car in park and stared at the phone.
Was this a joke? It had to be a joke.
She waited for the phone to ring again, but it never did. And she couldn’t redial the number, because there was no number to call back. She checked the text app, but there were no additional messages. When she tried to send something back (WHO ARE YOU?), all she got was an UNDELIVERED message in reply.
What the hell is going on here?
Quinn wasn’t sure how long she sat there looking down at the phone, but it had to be a few minutes. She didn’t snap out of it until she heard sirens coming toward her and put her eyes back on the road just in time to see an ambulance coming from the other side of the freeway. It disappeared north, in the direction of the hospital.
She put the car back in gear and stepped on the gas. She didn’t know where she was going—not yet, anyway—but anywhere was better than here. If she didn’t already have the full might of the FBI on her before, that would change when they discovered Pender and the other two in her room.
The question was: How much of their manpower would the Bureau take off the search for Porter and sic on her?
Or maybe the better question was: What now? God, what was she going to do now?
She couldn’t go to a hotel or one of the many roadside motels because the car was undoubtedly already reported stolen, and it wouldn’t take them very long to figure out she was the culprit. So she stayed away from large population centers and found a spot in a truck stop along a dead side street to rest, squeezing the Chevy in between two hulking semi-trailers that had shut down for the night.
Not that she could sleep.
Instead, Quinn reclined the seat back as far as it would go and spent every waking second running through everything she knew, or thought she knew, and, invariably, ended up focusing on that night at Gary Ross’s nightclub with Porter.
Was there anything she had missed? Or forgotten? Had Porter said anything else that she still couldn’t remember? As difficult as it was to explain, her memory of that night was foggier now that she was wide awake than it had been when the faceless men drugged her for their interrogation. And they had drugged her. She had no doubts about that, even if all the evidence said otherwise.
“The tests came back clean,” Ben had said. “There wa
s no drug in your system that couldn’t be accounted for by the hospital staff.”
Was it possible they had done something else to her that didn’t include drugs that helped her to remember? What if she was misremembering last night, just as she had misremembered the night in Gary’s office? Had the three faceless men even been faceless at all? That night, more than any in the past few days, felt like a dream. (More like a nightmare.) Maybe she had imagined the whole thing. Maybe Brown and Sterling had come to visit her for whatever reason—they were, after all, fellow FBI agents—and she’d shot them in some kind of delusional haze.
But why would they have come to visit long after visiting hours had passed? And who was the third man? Was there even a third man at all?
Nothing made sense. Nothing.
Tonight’s events hadn’t shed any lights on her problem. If anything, they had only added to it.
Who was the sniper that had saved her? And why?
The woman hadn’t been alone. Quinn knew that much. Her guardian angel had said we more than once. It was a slip, Quinn was sure of it.
“How did we find out where they were keeping you, or how did I know Clyde’s phone number?”
“We just wanted to see if you could bust out of the joint.”
“More precisely, we wanted to see if you would, given the opportunity.”
“We.” The woman had said it three times. Who was we?
So many questions, and no answers.
But at least out here she could do something about them. Out here, at least she could attempt to solve a problem that the FBI didn’t even know existed—or would have believed her if she tried to inform them. Someone out there was pulling strings, but she couldn’t decide if it was the same someone (or someones) or more than one.
But she knew one thing: Someone had sent Brown and Sterling into her room at three in the morning last night. Someone had ordered them to give her a drug that couldn’t be traced, that somehow helped her remember the night at Gary Ross’s nightclub with crystal clarity. Then someone else had helped her escape tonight.
And it all led back to, inevitably, Porter.
“It’s me,” Porter had said into his phone. “Things didn’t go as planned. You’ll have to proceed without me. I know. Good luck.”
There. The whole conversation, even if it was just from one side. It came back to her in a rush, as if she had just heard it a second ago.
“You’ll have to proceed without me,” he had said, because Quinn spotting him had led to a chain of events that prevented him from following up with whatever he was supposed to do afterward.
Porter was supposed to have gone somewhere, taken part in something after retrieving the package that Gary Ross had smuggled into the country for him. But he hadn’t made it. Instead, he had told whoever was on the other side of the phone call to “proceed without me.”
So whatever that “something” was, it had taken place anyway.
So what was it? What had gone down that night that was so important to Porter?
Quinn sat back up and started the car, and went hunting for a late-night Internet café.
What did the world’s most wanted terrorist have on his to-do list that was so important he wouldn’t—couldn’t—delay it, even while being surrounded by FBI agents?
That was the question Quinn asked herself over and over as she scrolled through the news headlines from one night ago. Something big had happened the night before, something major enough that Porter wouldn’t let his accomplices (and he had to have one; you didn’t vanish for five years without a lot of help) ignore it even if he couldn’t be there.
Most of that night’s headlines involved celebrities—someone semi-famous showing skin at a movie premiere, a has-been actress crying about a sex tape, an interview with a billionaire with political aspirations, and an up-and-coming rock star headed back to rehab for the fifth time.
She skipped through them, and when nothing national came up that could possibly have involved someone like Porter, she went granular and started searching only the headlines from, around, and about Houston.
There was a robbery at a national bank’s local branch, a murder suspect arrested by deputies when his wife turned him in for the reward, a child had gone missing for the tenth day, and someone had donated a box of presents to a women’s shelter. Those were the four main headlines, and below them she found news about people lining up for the annual release of a new smartphone a month early, a veteran defending his home against an intruder by shooting the would-be thief six times, and a couple from out of town arrested for swindling retirees.
Nothing. Nothing that even hinted at Porter’s involvement.
She reluctantly went back to the national headlines and dug even deeper.
A pending business merger between telecom giants in Europe and North America, upcoming elections in a couple of former Soviet satellite countries, and an impending battle at Capitol Hill over a military spending bill. Somewhere in Asia someone had gone on a rampage with a sword, while in the UK a referendum was being pushed about limiting immigration.
It took hours, and she came up with nothing. At least, nothing that she could definitively connect to Porter. There were no bombings and no murders of high-profile government officials or civilians. Nothing that would involve a man like Porter. He was a criminal and mass murderer, as well as a thief. He had stolen items during some of his crimes—important documents, virtual files, and in at least three occasions, computer servers in Munich, Nice, and Tokyo, though no one could ever understand why.
Was that it? Could he have returned home to steal something important?
She sifted back through the headlines, but the only thing involving a successful theft was the robbery at the local bank. It was a snatch-and-grab—two hooded thieves had charged into the lobby just as it was about to close and gotten away with about twenty thousand in cash from the teller windows, along with wallets and jewelry from the four customers that were still present. They had assaulted the security guard by hitting him in the head with the butt of a shotgun and escaped in a black van. The whole thing had gone down in less than three minutes. It was quick and efficient—signs of seasoned pros—and the police theorized they were the same ones that had hit three other branches in Houston, Dallas, and San Antonio in the last two months.
It was possible but unlikely Porter would be involved in a series of bank robberies. From what she knew through his Bureau file, the man seemed to have an unlimited source of funding. The eggheads didn’t know where his money came from, and it was one of the many mysteries surrounding the bogeyman that was Porter.
Who funded him? Who hid him? How does someone go off the grid for five years in today’s world? You couldn’t even erase your Facebook or Twitter profile without leaving trails, so how did Porter erase his offline and online presence so completely?
She shook her head, hoping to clear some of the cobwebs that had formed after staring at a computer screen for so long. It wasn’t just that nothing seemed to connect to Porter, but Porter himself was nowhere to be found in the news.
What was that Pete had said when she asked him about it back at the hospital?
“As far as anyone knows, last night’s explosion at Ross’s was an isolated event, the result of an accidental gas leak. The Bureau’s managed to keep the lid on Porter’s return so far. I don’t know how long that’s going to last though. Someone always manages to shoot their mouth off trying to get brownie points from a blonde in a short skirt. But for now, we’ve got it contained.”
It had been two full nights since the nightclub, and no one had found a blonde in a short skirt to spill the beans to yet. The press was still in the dark about Porter’s return, so either the FBI had become much better at shutting down information or something else was going on.
A part of her wondered why she was focusing so much on Porter. Was he even in Houston anymore? There were no high-value targets in the city except the port and a few booming tech companies like
Kobalcom. But would those things really be enough for Porter to risk everything by staying here after what had happened at Ross’s? Whatever he had come to do, someone else would have already done it for him that night. Unless, of course, that night was just a prelude to something bigger. Was that it?
She leaned back in her seat and stared off into space.
Maybe she was grasping at straws. Then again, she was out of ideas. She was wanted for the murder of two FBI agents, and whether she did it or not (Quinn still wasn’t sure, even now), she had a feeling Porter was involved. She didn’t know how—she wasn’t even anywhere close to knowing how—but it was a nagging feeling that wouldn’t go away, and she had learned to trust her instincts a long time ago. You had to, the way she grew up.
But that, of course, was before Ben came into her life and taught her a different way.
…before she paid him back by, in all likelihood, torpedoing his career right alongside hers.
At least she could be assured that Ben wouldn’t be going to prison with her. If nothing else, she’d done that much to keep him out of it. What happened tonight was all on her, and moving forward, she had to keep it that way.
“They’re going to come after you,” Porter had said. “They’re going to want to find out everything I said and did in this room. And when they’re done with you, they’re going to kill you. I’m sorry, but you’ll be on your own.”
He hadn’t been wrong. They had come after her. Brown and Sterling, and whoever that third man had been. She hadn’t dreamt it. The fact that Brown and Sterling ended up dead in her hospital room was proof of that.
Wasn’t it?
She was only certain of one thing: It all led back to Porter.
He had warned her…hadn’t he?
Maybe. Maybe…
She was kneading her forehead, feeling like every part of her was about to burst from the strain, when someone tapped her on the shoulder.
She glanced up at a young, smiling face. “You need anything else? More coffee?”
Quinn forced out a half-smile at the waitress. “More coffee would be great, thanks.”